The singer Robert Smith called his “most hated” for years: “All he fucking does is go out with models!”
The Cure frontman Robert Smith has never been above a good public mud-sling at some of rock and pop’s biggest names.
Burnished by punk but growing to a global behemoth by the end of the 1980s, The Cure managed to eschew much of the trappings of the celebrity clique, for the most part keeping well away from red carpets and VIP treatment ever since.
Such aversion to fame’s pitfalls perhaps lies in Smith’s dogged efforts to maintain a spark of essentiality to every record they make. Often entering the studio with the notion that the record being cut would be their last, The Cure have done a good job of steering clear of the bullshit to keep their creative synergy firing as many cylinders as possible, even with their 50th anniversary in touching distance.
So it’s not too much of a surprise that many of his supposed peers rub Smith up the wrong way. While his wife, Mary, has reportedly urged him to avoid overt disses to the press, Smith just can’t help himself at the best of times. If he perceives an artist to have disappeared up their own arse, or simply wallowing in creative bankruptcy, they’re likely to find themselves squarely centre of his excoriating barbs.
Over the years, Queen, The Darkness, and Duran Duran have all been met with colourful lambast, and, while softening his opinions later in life, he famously held a deep loathing for former Smiths crooner Morrissey.
Another of the day’s rock posterboys suffered one of Smith’s narked swipes. In his ever quest for vitality, The Cure had briefly toyed with playing the smaller indie venues to evoke some of the scrappy spirit of their Crawley youth before massive arenas and festival headliners. “Before the Wish Tour, I wanted for us to travel around Britain and have that feeling we used to have, a small group against the odds going really close to the audience, where you can’t get away with the light show,” Smith revealed to SPIN in 1993. “But then I remembered why I hated it: It’s dingy and it’s smelly and it’s nice that we don’t have to play these places”.
Such frank revelations on not missing the early days of the live circuit then pulled in one of Australia’s biggest names in the early 1990s. “Then I see INXS doing it, and this pandering interviewer saying to him, ‘Oh, did you start out playing small places?’ Well, everyone started out playing fucking clubs! You don’t start out playing stadiums. And he spouts all these contrived reasons for doing it. And then they did that song with all the models in it, and he said it was saying that women don’t have to conform to this notion of beauty, while all he fucking does is go out with models! He’s become my most hated person of the moment”.
They couldn’t have been more different. While The Cure were conjurers of an immersive, dramatic shroud veering between atmospheric introspection and kaleidoscopic irreverent pop, INXS and their charismatic frontman Michael Hutchence were resurrecting the spirit of Marc Bolan’s strutting preen and eager embrace of classic rock’s peacocking theatre, a flourish no doubt spelling alienation in team Cure.
Deeper than that is the perceived insincerity, however. Weaving a lore about soldiering through Sydney’s small pubs as if a unique trajectory to them, and aiming the objectification of women while seemingly forever in the eager company of conventionally beautiful girls, INXS’ divebomb into rock’s bombastic tendencies was everything Smith sought to avoid like the plague.
If a bevvy of models is good enough for Roxy Music, perhaps? Whatever the merits, Hutchence can count himself in Smith’s Hall of Shame, a distinguished roster that has, invariably, pulled in many an undisputed gem amid the generally agreed dross. Where INXS lie is up for debate.
